Recent years have witnessed the introduction and commercial deployment of a wide variety of communication systems and communication devices operable therein. Many varied communication services are able to be performed by way of communication systems. And, as additional advancements in communication technology shall likely continue to be made, yet more communication systems, providing yet more communication services, shall likely become available.
A cellular communication system is exemplary of a communication system that utilizes advancements in communication technologies and that, in significant part, has been made possible as a result of such advancements. Successive generations of cellular communication systems, and systems that exhibit some of the characteristics of cellular communication systems, have been developed and deployed. Newer-generation systems generally utilize digital communication techniques, oftentimes employing data coding functions. When speech data is communicated, i.e., a voice call forms the communication service, speech coding, and subsequent decoding, is oftentimes performed. The speech coding, and corresponding decoding, is performed using a CODEC (COder-DECoder) that operates to encode a stream of voice data into coded form. The coding of the voice data typically compresses the data, removing redundancies therefrom. And, decoding operations of the CODEC operate in reverse manner, that is to convert a compressed stream of data and to decompress the compressed stream.
An operational characteristic of a speech CODEC is its sampling rate. A CODEC that operates at a higher sampling rate generally provides better performance than a CODEC that operates at a low sampling rate. That is to say, if a CODEC operates at a high sampling rate, the voice quality of communicated voice data, once received and decoded is generally superior than when a CODEC operates at a lower sampling rate.
Various communication standards define the operational requirements of CODECs. For example, a 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) operating specification pertaining to speech CODECs defines standard parameters for an AMR (Adapted Multi-Rate) CODEC and an AMR-WB (Adapted Multi-Rate Wide Band) speech CODEC. An AMR speech CODEC is operated at an 8 kHz sampling rate, and an AMR-WB speech CODEC is operated at a 16 kHz sampling rate. In other communication systems, defined by other operating standards, analogous CODEC operating parameters are analogously defined.
While a CODEC operated at a higher sampling rate generally provides improved voice quality, such higher-rate CODECs require increased computational complexities, viz., higher CPU loads. For instance, when the CPU load is quantified in terms of WMOPS (Weighted Million Operations Per Second), the higher-rate, AMR-WB CODEC requires 38.9 WMOPS as contrasted to 16.8 WMOPS for the lower-rate AMR. The CPU load for the higher-rate CODEC operation is 130% greater than the CPU load of the lower-rate operation, largely due to the doubling of the sampling rate.
Additionally, if the higher rate is used in all processing algorithms of a communication station, including, e.g., acoustic echo cancellation, dynamic range controller, noise suppression, and post filtering, the CPU loading associated with running of these additional audio processing algorithms would result in an analogous increase in the CPU load required for their operation.
Due to the increased processing requirement, the operation of a communication station using a CODEC that operates at the higher sampling rate is significantly more power-consumptive than operation of the communication station at the lower sampling rate. If the communication station is operated using the higher-sampling rate CODEC when the battery level is low, a call is more likely to be abruptly terminated due to lack of power than if the communication station is operated using the lower sampling-rate CODEC. And, in contrast, due to the lesser processing requirement when operating the lower sampling rate CODEC, a lengthier period of usability of the communication station is possible.
If a manner could be provided by which to take into account the battery level of a battery power supply that powers a communication station when selecting which CODEC to use, improved operability of the communication station would be possible.
It is in light of this information related to coding and decoding of data that the significant improvements of the present disclosure have evolved.